Web Design – Subfolders or Subdomains?

When it comes to designing the structure of your web site, should you use subfolders or subdomains to distinguish between separate areas of your photography business? This question is one of the first ones in many web designers’ minds when considering the impact on the SEO of the overall web site structure.

For those who might be unclear on the differences, here is a quick explanation. A subfolder is a directory or folder that exists as part of the main domain (in the same way that we use folders on our computer drives), whereas a subdomain is a separate domain that is part of the hierarchy of a larger domain.

For example:

“http://weddings.photographer.com/” would be a subdomain of the “photographer.com” domain, and could be used to hold the information relating just to wedding photography for the company concerned.

On the other hand, “http://www.photographer.com/weddings/” can fulfill the same purpose but refers to a subfolder of the “website.com” domain.

Both structures are equally valid, but which one should you choose? Does choosing one structure over the other confer any advantage in terms of the SEO for the site? In other words, how search-engine friendly are these two methods?

Subdomains:

Most web hosting companies, but not all, allow at least a few subdomains to be created for your main domain. To create one is usually quite straightforward and can be done from the web site’s main control panel.

The benefits of using subdomains for each area of your photography business are:

• Each business area becomes a separate, unique web site
• It’s easy to make each site look different
• Google and the other search engines can treat links between the subdomains as though they are external links (however, this is not guaranteed)
• If you are using Google analytics it can be easier to track each subdomain separately

The disadvantages include:

• Each subdomain has to be maintained as a separate web site
• Sharing common files, such as menus, stylesheets etc. between the subdomains is not very practical
• Each subdomain should have its own sitemap if you are using the Google webmaster tools
• Google etc. might not include the subdomains in their index if they consider them to be too similar
• Limits on the number of subdomains you can have

Subfolders:

Subfolders can be used on any web hosting system, and this is the method that most web designers will choose.

Some of the advantages of subfolders include:

• Easy to set up and maintain
• Simple to share common files, stylesheets and other functions
• Usually easier for the search engines to crawl the whole site
• No practical limit to the number of subfolders you can use
• Only one sitemap is needed for the whole site (unless there are hundreds of URLs)

I can only think of one major disadvantage of using subfolders:

• All the links on the site are treated as internal links that don’t contribute site rank

Which to Use?

As far as I can tell, the only reasons to switch from using subfolders to subdomains for a web site are to increase page rank for the domain, or to simplify a domain by dividing it into more discrete sections that can be managed separately. The latter reason is usually more appropriate for large organizations and corporations, which most photography studios are not. So, for our type of business, that leaves the potential increase in search engine ranking as the primary reason to switch.

However, before you rush off to reconfigure your web site, consider this. If your resulting subdomains are too similar to each other, you could end up shooting yourself in the foot, and having the whole domain removed from the search index because it is determined to be spam.

In addition, it will take a lengthy period of time for the new subdomains to appear in search results, as they will be treated the same as any new site, usually with a page rank of zero.

Also, if the majority of the links to the subdomains are coming from the other subdomains, there may be little benefit in terms of increased page rank. Quality links from other, totally unrelated, sites are much more beneficial to you in terms of page rank.

Conclusion:

My advice would be to use the subfolder system unless there are overwhelming reasons specific to your business to change to subdomains. Instead, I would concentrate on acquiring quality inbound links from other web sites.

To help further, there is some evidence to suggest that using appropriate names for your subfolders and web files can certainly help with page ranking, especially if the names include appropriate keywords. For example:

http://www.merrickphoto.com/weddings/wedding-photography.php includes certain keywords in both the subfolder and the document names.

There are plenty of other articles on the web on this subject, some with differing opinions on the matter, so I would advise that you research this thoroughly before committing to a change to using subdomains. Bear in mind, too, that the search engines are continually changing their algorithms and what might be good one day may not be good the next.

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